'THE HAND,' CLEVER HORROR TALE

JON LANSDALE (Michael Caine) is a successful cartoonist, living contentedly in rural Vermont with his wife Anne (Andrea Marcovicci) and small daughter Lizzie (Mara Hobel). At least Jon is contented, and because Oliver Stone's ''The Hand,'' which opens today at the Cinerama 1 and other theaters, is seen entirely from Jon's point of view, we tend to agree with his near-blissful appraisal of things.

Yet something's not quite right. When Anne is not patronizing Jon by more or less pretending that nothing is wrong with their lives together, she's making deceptively sunny suggestions about their living apart for a while -she in New York, he in Vermont - in an effort ''to do something'' about their marriage. What is there ''to do?'' Jon appears to be baffled.

Yet after we've seen enough of Anne, we tend to become impatient with his reluctance to let her go. She's clearly bored out of her mind, which, at the beginning of the film, is filled with yearnings to realize herself by studying in New York at one of those quack institutions that preys on the vaguely dissatified. The place she wants to attend teaches its students a secret, self-help jargon and puts them through yoga exercises. However, just as Jon has agreed to Anne's wishes, his life is suddenly wrecked, for real, in a freak auto accident in which he loses his right hand, his drawing hand.

''The Hand,'' which Mr. Stone has adapted from a novel by Marc Brandel called ''The Lizard's Tail,'' is a suspense-horror film of unusual psychological intelligence and wit. It recalls the story made familiar by ''The Hands of Orlac'' and its various spin-offs, including ''The Beast With Five Fingers,'' though it's not an imitation.

''The Hand'' is, first, about Jon's unsuccessful efforts to find the severed hand and, then, about his growing realization that the hand has taken on a life of its own. Instead of simply decomposing in a cornfield or wherever it landed, after being sheared off by a truck, the hand begins to follow Jon around, even to California when Jon accepts a job teaching in a small college there. The hand seems to share Michael's jealousies, his depressions and his fury over their separation; yet it also resents Jon, as if blaming Jon for what was, after all, an accident.

One cannot tell much more of the story without giving everything away, but one of the things that Mr. Stone has done is to construct a screenplay that can be taken two ways with equal grace. At its most obvious, ''The Hand'' is a horror film, one in which some not easily describable ''thing'' terrorizes the countryside. It's also about anger so profound that it goes unrecognized, being accepted as an aspect of what might be called ''normal'' behavior until it gets out of control.

Mr. Stone's screenplay is tightly written, precise and consistent in its methods, and seemingly perfectly realized in the performances of the very good cast headed by Mr. Caine. It approaches its revelations in the self-assured way of a film made by someone who knows exactly what he's up to and has no need of red herrings. When Mr. Stone cross-cuts between a scene of Anne in her yoga class in New York and a shot of the severed hand crawling, crab-like, across a field far away, there is mad method at work as well as extremely dark humor.

Mr. Caine's performance is both steadfast and slightly off-center, as if, having lost his hand, the locus of his reason had shifted ever so slightly, along with his total weight. The performance is scary for being so utterly reasonable. Miss Marcovicci has the less appealing job of having to be an essentially mean-spirited, uninteresting woman, the sort who doesn't give up a smile without expecting payment in return, though she'd probably prefer that it not be in kind.

Chief among the members of the supporting cast are Annie McEnroe as the college student who seduces Jon because there's not much else to do; Rosemary Murphy as Michael's agent; Bruce McGill, as the psychology teacher who dispenses Freud between swigs of beer in the college pub, and Viveca Lindfors as a doctor who attempts to understand Jon's problems.

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Mr. Stone, who directed one earlier feature, the low-budget Canadian film, ''Seizure,'' in 1974, received an Oscar for his screenplay for ''Midnight Express.'' ''The Hand'' suggests that he's also a director of very real talent. Vincent Canby

On Two Levels

THE HAND, directed by Oliver Stone; screenplay by Mr. Stone, based on ''The Lizard's Tail'' by Marc Brandel; director of photography, King Baggot; edited by Richard Marks; music by James Horner; produced by Edward R. Pressman; released by Orion Pictures through Warner Bros. At the Manhattan I, 59th Street between Second and Third Avenues; Cinerama I, Broadway and West 47th Street; 86th Street I, at Lexington Avenue, and other theaters. Running time: 108 minutes. This film is rated R.